On-chain analytics firm Parsec is closing its doors after five years of operation, citing major shifts in crypto trader flows and on-chain activity that no longer align with its business model.
“Parsec is shutting down,” the company announced in a Thursday X post. CEO Will Sheehan explained that the “market zigged while we zagged a few too many times,” pointing to the company’s primary focus on decentralized finance and non-fungible tokens as areas that fell out of step with the industry’s current trajectory.
Sheehan elaborated on the changing landscape in his statement. “Post FTX DeFi spot lending leverage never really came back in the same way; it changed, morphed into something we understood less,” he said. He added that on-chain activity evolved in ways the company never fully grasped.
The closure comes as NFT market activity has significantly declined. NFT sales reached approximately $5.63 billion in 2025, representing a 37% decrease from the $8.9 billion recorded in 2024, according to CryptoSlam data. Average sale prices also fell year over year, dropping from $124 to $96.
Parsec had attracted investment from major industry players, including Uniswap, Polychain Capital, and Galaxy Digital. The company launched in early January 2021, just months before Bitcoin surged from around $36,000 to $60,000 by April of that year.
In its farewell message, Parsec expressed gratitude to its community. “It was quite the ride,” the company stated, adding that it is “eternally grateful to those who traversed the ups and downs on-chain.”
Alex Svanevik, CEO of competing on-chain analytics platform Nansen, acknowledged Parsec’s contribution to the space. “Had a great run,” Svanevik said in response to the announcement.
The shutdown follows a pattern of crypto startups facing challenges in the current market environment. Just weeks earlier, crypto startup Entropy announced it would close down and return funds to investors, citing scaling issues and difficulties finding product-market fit.
Industry consolidation appears to be accelerating. Bullish CEO Tom Farley predicted during a Feb. 8 CNBC interview that the sector will see significant consolidation in the coming months, with larger companies acquiring smaller projects. This could lead to a much less fragmented industry overall.
The crypto market has faced significant headwinds. Bitcoin’s price has declined 46% from its October all-time high of $126,100 to $67,246, according to CoinMarketCap data. Market sentiment has soured considerably, with Google searches for “Bitcoin going to zero” surging to their highest level since the post-FTX panic in November 2022, according to Google Trends data spanning the past five years.
The crypto analytics sector has proven particularly sensitive to market cycles, as demand for data and insights typically correlates with trading activity and investor interest. As DeFi lending protocols evolved and NFT trading volumes declined, Parsec found itself positioned in segments that no longer generated the activity levels needed to sustain its business model.
The company’s investors, which included some of the most prominent names in crypto venture capital, had backed Parsec during the height of the DeFi and NFT boom. However, the fundamental shift in how traders interact with on-chain protocols and the steep decline in NFT market activity ultimately proved too challenging for the analytics firm to navigate.
Parsec’s closure serves as another indicator of the crypto industry’s maturation process, where projects that thrived during specific market cycles face existential challenges when those conditions change. The company’s five-year run spanned multiple market cycles, from the 2021 bull run through the 2022 bear market and into the current volatility.
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